Sunday, September 9, 2012

Choking Your Readers To Death

Ulysses is the description of a single day, the sixteenth of June 1904, a Thursday, a day in the mingled and separate lives of a number of characters walking, riding, sitting, talking, dreaming, drinking, and going through a number of minor and major physiological actions during this one day in Dublin and the early morning hours of the next day. --from Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov

It's somehow fitting that with this endless eyesore of a sentence, Nabokov exactly imitates the unreadable style of James Joyce.

Perhaps he's being deliberately ironic and making some kind of lit-crit joke. Maybe this is the kind of prose that makes literature grad students nod knowingly and LOL to each other.